 Good evening, you're very welcome to this latest young professional network event, focusing on Ireland's recent presidency of the UNSC and the much wider UN Security Council agenda. My name is Dara Moriarty, I work in research and communications here at the Institute and I chair our YPN. Absolutely delighted this evening to be joined by Richard Gown, who I'm going to formally introduce in a moment. He's right in the middle of the action in New York around the UN scene and he'll be discussing a couple of different things to us this evening and he'll give initial remarks and then we'll pick up with some Q&A and then we're really keen to hear from the audience as well with your questions. Firstly he's going to offer us a bit of sort of initial reflection and insights just on the very recent Ireland presidency of the UN Security Council were just concluded in September and secondly then he'll sort of widen the scope a little bit further and look at the 2021-2022 UN Security Council agenda and then lastly I suppose he's going to sort of zoom out even further than that and look at the actual focus and function of the UNSC in the global multilateral order so a loss on our plate this evening and really looking forward against looking into that with Richard. Before I begin and introduce Richard just let me formally mention some of the housekeeping issues that we have which I'm sure you're all very accustomed to at this point around Zoom. You can get involved as I mentioned by submitting your questions through our Q&A function. I'll be keeping an eye on them and post them to Richard directly and then also you can obviously join the discussion on social media you can get involved on Twitter using the handle at IEEA and the hashtag YPN and then finally we will be uploading this full discussion to our YouTube channel and to our podcast platforms as well so you can listen back if you missed anything or want to take some notes. Let me just now formally introduce Richard. Richard oversees the UN work for the International Coises Group. Liaison with diplomats and UN officials in New York he's previously a consulting analyst with ICG in 2016 and 2017 and he's worked at the European Council on Foreign Relations. New York University is Centre for International Cooperation and Foreign Policy and he's taught at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and Stanford in New York so a very distinguished speaker to address us this evening. Richard, thanks very much for taking the time out of your agenda. You're very very welcome. The floor is yours. Well, thank you very much, Daraith and thank you very much to everyone for joining the call and it's nice to see some friends' names amongst the participants as well today. Yeah, what I'm going to do is set the scene with a few words about the state of the Security Council in general and then dive down into a very brief and very preliminary assessment of Ireland's performance in the Council in its first nine months on the job. And I'm pleased to say that I think you'll find that it's a very positive assessment too. I'll talk a little bit about how Irish diplomats are seen in New York. Now the mission is working at a technical level dealing with day-to-day diplomatic challenges and then I'll talk about a few of the themes such as the conflict in Ethiopia and bigger questions like climate security which Ireland has to some extent made its own in council debates since January of this year. But just to set the stage a few comments on the bigger picture. This has been I think both the year of hope but also a year of shocks in the Security Council. The reason that it's been a year of hope is fairly obvious and that is that the Trump administration which was instinctively very negative and very disruptive towards the UN left office in January and was replaced by a Biden administration that overall has been far more friendly towards the institution and far more willing to look for ways to work through the Security Council. I don't think we can underestimate how much damage Trump had actually done to the US presence at the UN especially in his last couple of years in office and with the US refusing to engage in many debates in the Security Council the Council as a whole had lost a lot of energy and I think Ireland was fortunate to be joining the Council at a pivotal moment where the US wanted to re-engage and wanted to show that it takes the institution and takes international cooperation much more seriously and will come on to some of the areas like the conflict in Ethiopia where Ireland has actually been able to work I think very effectively with the Americans. But it has also been a year of shocks. It has been a year where a series of crises have challenged the Security Council, some of them almost entirely unpredictable, some of them you know in some ways predictable but still very very hard for the diplomats to handle. Those crises have included the coup in Myanmar on the 1st of February which pretty much coincided with Biden's people coming to the UN for the first time. It included the May conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians which caused a major rift inside the Security Council about how to react and then perhaps above all it's included the Afghan crisis in August which you know has hit diplomats in New York as hard as it hit everyone you know shaking up a lot of our assumptions about you know how the US can deal with you know deal with conflicts worldwide and you know what we're trying to achieve through peacemaking and peace building in places like Afghanistan. So it's been a year of unpleasant surprises. I would say that prior to the high level General Assembly session in September there was a lot of talk around the UN about you know whether the US was losing its way, whether the US could remain a credible leader after Afghanistan. I think that Joe Biden actually did a good job in his speech to the General Assembly in late September in sort of stopping that sort of chatter. He was honest about what had gone wrong in Afghanistan but he also I think made some fairly powerful interventions about the challenge of climate change and the challenge of COVID that won over a lot of his audience. So I think it's still fair to say that you know the Biden administration carries a lot of weight in New York diplomats find it much much easier to work with the American team now than they did prior to January but nonetheless there you know there have been a lot of shocks to the system and the Irish along with the Norwegians Mexicans and other elected members of the council have had to try and find ways to navigate those shocks. So what's the what's the take on how Ireland has performed? I think that the overall view of the Irish team in New York is very positive and there are a number of reasons for this. I mean firstly the most important thing in any diplomatic mission is the personnel and the personnel are good. Ambassador Geraldine Byrneson is very well respected amongst her colleagues but all the way down the system you have a team of officials who know their files who did a lot of hard work in terms of preparation and learning the files before January and who are generally seen to be activists. In any debate Irish diplomats sort of have positions have priorities that they're fully engaged and that has been noted and that has been respected. I think it's also worth saying that Ireland has got some of the details of being in the council right communications is an obvious one. It's actually very important in this day and age for Security Council missions to have a strong presence on Twitter to be getting out their political positions in the public domain and I think if any of you follow Irish mission UN on Twitter you will sort of know that they have done a very good job of communicating to the outside world including during the presidency in September. So overall I think the Irish are getting very good reviews from their counterparts. I mean there are naturally some criticisms. Interestingly the one criticism I hear quite a lot comes from Ireland's EU partners and that criticism is that actually Ireland is not really being a very good EU member in the Security Council and by that they mean that Dublin isn't really looking to Brussels for leads on how to deal with many of the situations on the council agenda. The Irish are not really looking to other EU missions in in New York for leads on how to deal with the crises that you're facing. Instead there's a sense that Ireland very much wants to have its own national policy and to carve out its own course on a lot of the crises that it's looking at and part of that is also that Ireland has sort of invested a lot for example in building close relations with the African members of the council and so I think that you know I think that actually tactically it's important for Ireland to reach out beyond the EU group to be listening to the full range of council members but it is it is worth saying that this is the one criticism that I that I often hear that some other EU members feel that in contrast to for example maybe Belgium or Germany last year the Irish are a bit less bound by the EU than than others might like. But anyway what is what is all this delivered? Because you know I was talking to a member of the Irish mission the other day and you know he said what what every elected member of the council always says which is that you can do all the training that you like you can have all the plans you can have all the mechanisms for getting instructions from capital but the reality is when you enter the council you're hit by a flood of crises and the day to day work of the council is overwhelming. The number of issues that are on the council's agenda is enormous and you know even for a relatively well informed foreign ministry such as Ireland you know you're having to deal with questions about what to do in for example the Central African Republic that do not come naturally and so you know the the preparation is important but the reality is always a bit of a shock and in a year of major crises the level of shock has been high. Well I think that overall Ireland has done a good job responding to some of the main crises that have hit it while also staying true to some of the the big themes that Dublin promised that it would pursue while in the council. I think the crisis where Ireland really made a mark early on and actually impressed the incoming American team was Ethiopia and at the start of the year no one was really sure what was happening with the conflict in Ethiopia which kicked off I think in November 2020 there were some in the Security Council such as the Russians who were arguing that really the UN didn't need to bother with what was going on in Ethiopia that it was an internal political issue that outside powers shouldn't interfere in but the Irish from a very early stage identified a major humanitarian crisis brewing in Ethiopia and quietly gradually got together with the African members of the council that's Kenya, Niger and Tunisia to start saying look the council needs to debate this, the council needs to put out some statements about the importance of at least getting humanitarian assistance into the Tigray region of Ethiopia. The African group was initially skeptical quite naturally they didn't want to offend Addis Ababa but as time went by the African positions have converged with those of the Irish and Ireland has been a sort of a leading voice in the council for keeping a light on what's going on in Ethiopia as the Tigray conflict intensifies and spreads and this is something which Linda Thomas Greenfield the US ambassador to the UN who arrived in late February has given Geraldine and her team a lot of credit for. Linda Thomas Greenfield who is an old Africa hand in the State Department is personally very concerned about the situation in Tigray she said from the beginning it would be one of her priorities but she's also recognized that actually it's been very useful to have Ireland leading a lot of these discussions about what to do in Ethiopia because if it was just the US that would actually create more political blowback. Now sadly Ireland's efforts have not succeeded in ending the crisis in Ethiopia it's actually getting worse there's a lot of tension with China and Russia still over what to do about this crisis but the council is now seized of Ethiopia and I think Ireland is recognized as one of the de facto leaders in discussing that situation which we would not have predicted back in January and which was by no means guaranteed back in January and it was the fact that your team in New York were willing to run with this backed up strongly by Dublin that allowed them to sort of get a toe hold get a foothold in an important diplomatic debate. Other areas where Ireland has sort of performed notably include working closely with Norway to guide the renewal of the UN's mandate for cross border aid to Syria in June or July we can go into this in more detail in the Q&A but back in 2014 I think the Security Council authorized the UN to get aid into Syria without government permission. Russia has increasingly tried to undermine that mandate in recent years. Norway and Ireland were charged with guiding a resolution through continuing the cross border aid this summer and again I think they worked very closely with the Biden administration which was very concerned to keep this mandate alive to ensure that there was a successful outcome to that process. Now that cooperation with the US was not easy. I think the US was doing a lot of back channel diplomacy in Geneva a lot of back channel diplomacy in other capitals working with the Turks trying to get a deal with the Russians. I'm not sure the Irish and Norwegians always felt that the US was as open with them as it could be about its diplomatic intentions but at the end of the day the push worked and Norway, Ireland and the US were able to keep this mandate alive and the resolution for cross border aid was extended by another year in early July and this was again a win that Thomas Greenfield but also I think senior figures in in Washington are very much appreciated. Two other more thematic areas where Ireland has made its mark that I would highlight are around the women peace and security agenda and then around the climate security agenda and I'll just touch on these and then I'll you know I'll wrap up my initial remarks. The Irish mission here is seen as very much a leader and very much an activist on questions of women peace and security. There is an informal working group on WPS as UN nerds know it here in New York, Ireland is co-chairing that with Mexico and Ireland has used that pulpit very effectively to put out a series of quite strong statements on for example the need to include women in the peace process in Yemen but Ireland's work on women peace and security really came into focus in August with the collapse in Afghanistan when the security council negotiated a resolution basically calling on the Taliban to behave responsibly after the fall of Kabul and I think one big question about that resolution was whether it would refer to the position of women in Afghanistan. Now all the western council members were agreed that the resolution should at least reference women's rights but Ireland and Mexico pushed hard for it to include some language about women's participation in post-war politics in in Afghanistan and I think there's a feeling that Ireland and Mexico succeeded in getting that language into the resolution about women's participation in politics over the objections of China and Russia and so it's just a few words and we don't know if the Taliban have read those words but at least it was an important symbolic gesture during a very very difficult moment in the council's history. Finally sorry finally there is climate security and from the beginning of the year Ireland had been emphasizing that it would like to see the security council pass a resolution its first resolution on the security implications of climate change and the Irish have been working closely with the African members of the council particularly Niger to achieve this resolution. There had been some hope that it might be possible to pass a resolution on climate security in September during the Irish presidency but China and Russia and also India are all quite skeptical of this proposal so it was concluded that September was too early. Nonetheless the Taoiseach led I think a well-received debate on climate security during the high level week of the General Assembly in the Security Council and on the 30th of September I think I'm right in saying maybe a few days beforehand Ireland and Niger tabled a draft resolution calling for the UN to take climate security more seriously. Now that resolution is still under negotiation there was a detailed read through of the text on Monday involving all council members we think that the negotiations will go on at least into December when Niger holds the presidency of the Security Council. India China and Russia remain highly skeptical and it's not clear that they can be persuaded to back this and obviously China and Russia could veto the text but I think there is still also a chance that they will agree to this resolution and so by the end of this year Ireland will be able to claim we hope that it has been one of the co-parents of a very significant I think council product on on climate change. We still have to see if that's the case and you know clearly we're still only in the first year and I suspect there are many more shocks to come for Ireland and everyone else in the Security Council but so far I would say that the Irish team in New York has navigated a difficult year creatively it's got points on the board as basketball players like to say over here and I think it's getting a lot of respect around the UN system for that. Brilliant Richard look thanks very much for that very rich and deep analysis of first of all sort of the year it's been with the Biden administration taking up and sort of the the gear change that represents from Trump we might touch on that a little bit more in the Q&A but then I just think on Ireland in particular and you know you covered some work in detail there and you know I think the general population of Ireland they're obviously a lot more aware of Ireland's presence on the UN Security Council on the UN agenda in general but maybe they don't have the same level of knowledge of all the intricacies and I think for you to be able to sort of outline them all there and some of the key the key issues where they've made headway I think is really useful for the attendees this evening obviously then for the people who will also watch and listen back to this discussion so thanks very much for that. If I may I'll kick off with my own couple of questions and that was watching in if you're afraid to get stuck in as well and drop your questions in and to Richard you've heard there that the breadth of his knowledge on all the different issues so he's well adverse to sort of open on a number of different areas and I might start to just pick you up on the beginning of your presentation then we'll get to Ireland just around that dynamic of the Biden administration coming in and you know I saw you're writing a piece about his his big speech at the General Assembly and how do you feel that went and how do you feel sort of the UN system has responded to America being back for once a better term how has that gone down? Well firstly I mean you know more generally it's been very easy for US officials to say America is back but you know the US system does not turn you know on a dime when administrations change and even though the Biden team were very keen to demonstrate their commitment to multilateralism early on for example by rejoining the Paris climate deal you know it has taken time for the US system to start re-engaging constructively with parts of the UN that the Trump administration had boycotted and you know it's worth saying that there are still a lot of Trump decisions that are resonating in the UN that Biden hasn't resolved you know to take quite a minor one that has been in discussion in New York this week Trump recognized Morocco's sovereignty of the western Sahara now this makes UN efforts to find a political solution to the western Sahara conflict very very difficult the Biden team have not explicitly walked back from Trump's position on Morocco's sovereignty so you know turning the ship takes takes time again you know another early statement from Washington was that the US would rejoin the Human Rights Council in Geneva that was Trump had pulled out of the Human Rights Council election is today I haven't seen the results but I mean the US will have got its seat because it was a clean slate but it will it will be some time before the US is sort of you know really fully re-engaged in in Geneva and I think there have also been a couple of incidents such as the the May Israeli-Palestinian violence which have somewhat compromised the claim that America is back the US in May blocked any sort of Security Council statement on the violence in the Middle East because it claimed that it would alienate the Israelis and the fact that the Biden administration took that position I think really irritated a lot of other members of the council I think including Ireland so the US return has by no means been smooth nonetheless I would say that Biden did a good job in his general assembly speech really by trying to focus attention away from some of these specific crises you know like the Israeli-Palestinian situation or you know like Afghanistan but instead he tried to focus on global issues like COVID-19 and climate change and I think he made quite a strong case in that speech that the US can continue to lead on issues like climate now of course in making that case he was sending another message which was that the US is better qualified to lead than China is and you know Chinese-US relations remain tense at the UN but overall I think that you know Biden did remind other presidents and prime ministers in New York that you know US leadership is is still pretty essential in a lot of multilateral processes and we shouldn't always obsess about the bumps in the road of America re-engaging but instead see the overall direction of travel Brilliant Richard thanks very much for that a couple of questions coming in there now please keep them coming in and we'll get on to them and pose them to Richard and just another question I'd like to put to you as well you know you sort of mentioned the areas where Ireland is really doing well and it's well regarded among its colleagues and you know not for a second wanting to gloss over them and because I think you know we are following them and I think the issues around ETL, that you mentioned sort of the the credit that Ireland has in the bank for its sort of commitments to handling and trying to find some sort of resolution to those issues is obviously very very welcome and we're delighted to hear that as an international first team thank you for the regard that Ireland has held in in that respect which you did also mention the sort of the the sort of unilateral approach maybe that Ireland takes from its own foreign policy standpoint and maybe not not not coordinating as well with with its European colleagues and I suppose looking at Ireland's actual campaign you know they really did set themselves up as this broker this honest broker that you know wouldn't be taken in by by sort of maybe dogmatic positions within Europe but that they could reach out to African nations, Swale Island nations and etc so I mean how would you see that dynamic actually playing out and is that just Ireland being true to the campaign at rank? I mean I think that's completely right I think that you know Ireland had made it clear that in this you know in the council as in many other UN processes it would sort of give a hearing to views from non-western countries you know with a degree of sympathy that perhaps not all EU members always do and so in that sense the way that Ireland engaged early with the African members of the council on Tigray as I described was entirely in keeping with Ireland's campaign pledges I mean I think one of the reasons this EU question does come up a lot is that obviously there's been a bit of a shift in the EU's profile in the in the Security Council over the last couple of years. Two years ago five of the 15 council members were EU states including at that time the UK and in that period when countries like Sweden and the Netherlands were on the council or more recently Germany there was quite a strong sense of you know the EU being a force in Security Council affairs. Now sadly and I won't say any more on that we have had Brexit but also Norway is holding one of the the western European seats you know sitting outside the EU and so the you only have three EU countries in the council France which obviously has its own very clear national positions on UN affairs. Estonia which is has been a good member of the EU team but in some ways is closer to the Americans than maybe the EU norm and then Ireland which is carving out its own its own national sort of approach to a lot of the crises on the agenda and so you know instead of there being a sense of a strong EU sort of block in the council as there was in maybe 2017-2018 you have more of a sense of a sort of a disparate group of European countries following their own national interests and their own sort of particular approaches to diplomacy and next year you know we'll actually be down to an EU too because Estonia will leave and Albania will take its place as the one eastern European country on the council. Now Albania is actually very closely aligned with the EU on most issues so it you know it will be a sort of a fairly loyal follower but I mean I think what we're coming down to here is you know the classic problem of EU diplomacy at the UN which is to be effective European countries have to talk to non-European countries you have to sort of secure their votes you have to secure their support secure their sympathy but when you have different European countries you know using different tactics to win over the Africans or whatever the sense of an EU foreign policy identity in New York does dissipate a bit and I think that's what what we've what we've seen over the last the last year. Right thanks very much Richard for that and I'll give you a bit of some questions colleague of mine Ross Fitzpatrick Ross is the IAJ Research from the Global Europe aimed for listeners in and he's been he's been writing extensively on sort of Ireland's position within the UN and all the different issues that are ongoing and he has a question for Richard he says thanks for your presentation he comments in your excellent insights and he just he I'll read out his question exactly and due to the crises in Afghanistan, Syria, Haiti, Ethiopia and elsewhere the dire political humanitarian human rights situation in Myanmar is one which is falling off the council's agenda in recent months he says and does Richard have any hope for the upcoming ASEAN summits to achieve any political progress and is there a case to be made for shifting responsibility away from the council where regional organizations like ASEAN may be a better place to deal with complex regional issues and I should just say on that particular note at tomorrow at the Institute tomorrow lunchtime actually we have the UN special envoy for me and Maya speaking to us and hopefully put his question to her as well and see what she thinks. Edward Richard what would your view be on Ross's question there? I mean yeah the the Myanmar story in the council it's almost been the reverse of the Ethiopia story you know Ethiopia at the start of the year no one seemed to be paying any attention to it until Ireland started to stir up interest and then you know the US joined the Irish and now the council is really seized of what's happening in Ethiopia by contrast after the the one February coup in Myanmar for a month the council was it was you know incredibly focused on what was happening there and everyone was taken off balance even the Chinese it seems were quite badly taken off balance by this coup and that the Chinese frankly did not want the coup to happen and so you had this brief period where it was possible for the UK you know leading the talks with the Chinese to persuade even China and Russia to back a series of statements condemning the coup and calling for a return to normal politics you know then tragically the coup despite a lot of resistance and violence held and you know the the hunter remains in power and certainly my my colleagues at crisis group who are covering the situation on the ground say that although there is serious resistance to the hunter it's unlikely that you're going to see it collapse anytime soon and so you know and in the same period the Chinese have grown less less willing to to cooperate with the west on this issue and in the council you know attention has fallen away from from Myanmar you know while you know Afghanistan and other shocks have come up the agenda the way that the council sort of dealt with this issue was essentially to turn to ASEAN as an alibi the one thing that everyone could agree on in in New York was that ASEAN should be allowed to try and find a political solution to this crisis but I would say that you know in honesty a lot of you and diplomats you know felt they they they would turn to ASEAN because they had no other options but they didn't really believe that it was going to make a huge difference in terms of mediation ASEAN is famously very cautious in its approach to crisis management and doesn't like to interfere in the internal affairs of its members to date ASEAN hasn't really been very affected it did hold a special summit on the crisis you know it did sort of lay out some terms for peace that it wanted to see the hunter follow but the generals have ignored it and there's been quite a lot of talk in New York about the fact that with the ASEAN approach failing the UN might have to jump back in and try and do some more on on Myanmar but no one has been quite quite sure exactly what the UN could do now there is currently a slightly weird shift in the dynamic because ASEAN has its some leaders summit coming up and the ASEAN leadership do not want to sort of have the the military leadership of Myanmar at that summit unless they have made some concessions and so it does look like the ASEAN is actually going to lean quite hard on Myanmar now to try and make some concessions before the summit or they may not even invite Myanmar to the summit so this could actually be the moment where ASEAN gets a grip and does put some pressure on the Burmese generals but I would say that overall sitting in New York this has been a depressing story because it's felt like one of those moments where security council members after an initial burst of enthusiasm gradually back away from dealing with a crisis and leave it to someone else you know which again I would contrast with the Ethiopia story where council members could easily just have dropped the entire game in the first quarter of this year when it did look like the that Ethiopia might win a decisive victory and move on but instead the Africans Island and others kept the issue alive and now the issue is very high on everyone's minds. I would encourage you to look and try and look for that answer and we'll be discussing that more tomorrow as I mentioned with the UN special envoy for Myanmar and if you may I just want to refer to the climate resolution because you touched on that briefly in your in your presentation just about where that currently sits and you know you said it could go either way essentially with with a couple of the key players who were you know there's intensive discussions about trying to get them on side and if we look ahead to sort of 2022 and sort of switch that's going to happen with the non-permanent members you know what the dynamics you think will be at play then you mentioned December as a possible cutoff I mean if we if we tip into January what's the likelihood then with the sort of new members that are going to rotate in of reaching of reaching some sort of agreement there. So I don't have a decisive breakdown of what the new members of the council will will do on climate security issues but the the reason that there is I think a real urge now to try and get a resolution before the end of this year is that island Indonesia I think with a lot of support from Kenya Norway and you know actually the backing of most council members worked very hard in the middle of this year to get a text that all members of the council could agree to on climate security with the exception of India, China and Russia and the whole point was to sort of get unity within the the bulk of the council and then go to the you know sort of show a unified front to to the Chinese and Russians in particular to try and persuade them not to veto this this resolution now if you get to the 1st of January and the resolution has not not passed then it's going to be necessary to step back and start renegotiating with the new council members about what should what should be in this text and you know just inevitably that will that will take time. One of the incoming council members next year Brazil is known to be very very skeptical at least under its current leadership about climate change diplomacy and probably just wouldn't engage with this process but even you know even the others again have to be sort of brought on board with the text that was agreed under under Irish stewardship this this summer so there is a bit of a deadline looming on the 31st of December and I think everyone who supports this resolution would like to see it see it comes through. I you know I just genuinely don't know if that will be possible and I think that to some extent the really big decisions are not going to be made in New York at all the really big decisions are going to be made in Beijing and Moscow. In Beijing China is going to have to decide does it want to be seen to be blocking a climate change resolution when China's overall global narrative is that it you know that is actually a champion of multilateral cooperation on climate change something that Xi Jinping was really emphasizing in his speech to the general assembly and it's possible that the Chinese will just look at this and think you know at the end of the day it's not worth taking a reputational hit we'll abstain we'll let this through. Then you look at Moscow and the big question there is does Vladimir Putin look at this especially if the Chinese have indicated that they don't really they don't really want to block this will Putin block it alone especially if he knows that it's something that the US really really wants. I'm not sure he necessarily will so you know you can get so far in New York but a lot comes down to some of those conversations in and some of those decisions in capital. I think we're now entering a period in terms of the diplomacy where probably there's going to be at least a month or so for bilateral discussions of this resolution and you would hope that not only Irish diplomats and Norwegian diplomats in Moscow and Beijing but also their US counterparts will be sort of giving some firm messages to the Chinese and Russians just saying look you know let this thing through it's not actually a big threat to your interests and if they do that it may it it may just work out. Okay Richard really thanks thanks for that for that bit of insight just on where that might go because I think obviously Irish eyes are really watching that one keenly to see what material is with it. The question in here from Stephen Frane I think we took on some of this already but I'll put it to you specifically because it's it deals with sort of Ireland's interest of its own on the foreign policy agenda and not necessarily cooperating with EU member states but its specificity looks at Africa and he asks can Ireland engage and coordinate more with other EU member states while maintaining its close relationships and working relationships with the African Security Council members or is there just two more divergence in the views of those other European states and the African states in particular and so we're interested to get the views on that one. Well I think I think I've already touched on this sort of you know the sense that Ireland has its own its own identity in council politics which includes this sort of special link to the the African group and you know it's interesting if you then look at the other two EU members of the council you have France which has its own very deep you know links in Africa on the one hand and then you have Estonia which has I think two diplomatic presences in all of Africa an embassy in Cairo and then a liaison office in Addis Ababa and you know just doesn't have the same sort of equities in African affairs that that France does so you know in a sense it would be quite strange if these three countries were all sort of on completely the same page in dealing in dealing with the African group because their their interests are so divergent that said I mean I think that you know I think that it is important that when it comes to dealing with a situation like Ethiopia going forward as far as possible you know Ireland speaks with the leverage of the whole EU group behind it and so you know just to give you an example of how this is problematic you know Ireland has you know through the year been pushing for sort of greater international attention to Tigray we know that there are certain members of the EU I think Spain for example who have been quite wary of taking a strong line over Tigray and within discussions in Brussels have actually sort of argued for a more a more moderate approach to dealing with Addis Ababa now clearly Ireland would have maximum leverage in the Security Council over Ethiopian affairs if it genuinely spoke with the the entire weight of the EU behind it um it's possible that in some cases you know Irish diplomacy maybe has got a bit far away from where some of the EU members are but I think it's also worth saying that some of you members have probably made Ireland's life more difficult by not sort of you know fully supporting lines that Dublin would like so it cuts it cuts both ways. Thanks very much for looking I know I know we did put another round but it's good to sort of actually delve into the specific African issues well there's a pretty good going back over that and you mentioned when you glossed over Brexit in in your remarks I'm I'm afraid to say that Brexit is very detailed and we could often go to the new events as a particular focus on Brexit the question from Andrew Gilmore and he says thanks for your presentation and some years ago you wrote about the UK being an anchor for EU policy at the UN and the potential for Brexit to upset the key dynamics among the EU members in the UNSC and can you comment on whether and to what extent these dynamics have changed in the post-Brexit era again I think you have touched a little bit briefly honest and would possibly interest to get a bit more a bit more go a bit deeper on on some of those issues around the specifics of the UK. So Brexit has definitely started to have an effect on UN diplomacy although not always in the ways that you might have predicted in advance I mean I think the key thing to say is that happily the UK relations with EU members in the UN seem to be quite insulated from what's going on between Brussels and London or indeed Brussels sorry London and Dublin at the moment cooperation on a sort of interpersonal desk-to-desk basis between UK diplomats in New York and their former EU counterparts remains pretty good and what you hear from all the EU 27 is that actually when it comes to sharing information sharing ideas sort of strategizing about how to get stuff through the UN you know the Brits remain very friendly and generally very constructive and so I mean that's you know that's a positive we haven't seen the sort of breakdown in relations that you know if you looked at some of the higher-order stuff you might fear would be taking place here. There are occasional moments of symbolic politics that create irritation so back in February the UK organized a big security council meeting on climate change with David Attenborough which got everyone very excited and they invited some non-council members such as Germany to speak at that but they turned down an EU request to speak and it was clear that that was a sort of a small symbolic snub to the EU but you know those sort of irritants do not outweigh the overall good spirit that exists in terms of cooperation. I think that one of the reasons that cooperation is relatively friendly is actually to do with the circumstances under which Brexit took place which was that in the first post-Brexit year last year the Trump administration's position on things like Iran was so egregiously destructive that the UK inevitably sided with the Europeans and didn't sort of drift off towards the US in the way that it might have done under other circumstances. So Trump actually in a sense made it easier for the UK to stay close to the EU because of America's behavior. Now you know things are changing obviously in the relationship with things like AUKUS and I don't rule out that over time we will see more of a UK EU divergence in UN affairs but for the time being I'm optimistic that it will be a soft divergence and that actually on most of the issues on the council agenda London will find that it's 90% aligned with the EU and it won't be a huge problem and I think that will be good both for the UK and for the EU. The one interesting footnote is actually post-Brexit the country that's really having to reassess its role at the UN is France because you know France suddenly finds itself as the one permanent EU member of the council and I think French officials are worried by talks that they should sort of Europeanize their position in New York to a greater degree and what we've actually seen is the French really emphasizing over the last year or so that they are not just a representative of the EU here that they are a P5 member and so for example Paris has been talking a lot with the Russians about the need for greater P5 cooperation and I think one of the reasons for that is to show that they're not just going to translate French influence at the UN into EU influence at the UN. Now it's worth noting that Olaf Scholz the man who is most likely to be the next German Chancellor once said he thought that France should turn its council seat into an EU seat and I wonder if that slightly worries people in the LEC as he sort of approaches the chancellorship but so yeah actually in a weird way Brexit has had a greater effect on French diplomacy here than in some ways on UK diplomacy which is not what I would have predicted two or three years ago. That's really interesting torn that that answer took towards the French so that's really interesting insight to guess and you briefly touched on it and we'll finish on this one unless anybody wants to pop in a little question we can we can wrap up after this I'll just put a final question to Richard you mentioned AUKUS and you know that also got you know French backs up and they were they were they were most as pleased about sort of the coordination that was going on behind the scenes between the UK the US and Australia how was that being perceived and received within the UN system around New York is there is there is there much to do about nothing or our country is not happy that sort of this sort of mini lateral streak is broken out and how how has it been how has it been received I mean just I'll throw one thing at you we recently had known Tom Ski speak to us at the Institute about two weeks ago and his views on on the AUKUS collaboration was that you know essentially the US is putting itself on collision course for some sort of inevitable conflict and we're trying to down the line and if the US continues to pivot in this way by making those those those type of deals that's where we're heading and so yeah so a couple of different things there but interest to get your views on that and then we'll wrap up Richard so AUKUS you know AUKUS did cast a shadow over the high level week of the general assembly in in September purely for timing reasons which was that the the news broke I forget maybe four or five days before Biden gave his big speech in in New York and you know this came on the back of the the afghan the afghan crisis and I think it sort of you know it did feed into a sort of general discourse around Biden's appearance that you know the US commitment to to multilateralism was not all that Biden had cracked it up to be but as I think I said in my initial remarks I think Biden dealt with that um that sort of overall negative narrative quite effectively in his speech I mean he did talk about Afghanistan he didn't talk about AUKUS although he did have nice things to say I think about Australia as well as um as well as the EU but what I think what Biden got right actually in his speech coming back to that was that he recognized that for the vast majority of leaders who sit in the UN General Assembly Hall you know the question of submarines was just not relevant uh to them or their public's and what the majority of leaders from the developing world um who are in New York who otherwise don't have real access to the US president what they wanted to hear was that the US was going to do more on vaccines for COVID and that the US was going to do more on financing for climate adaptation um for poor states and um you know Biden really lent into those issues I mean you know he talked a lot about the need to sort of uh you know push out vaccines into countries where they haven't been received yet he offered more money for climbing for climate financing um I think I think he actually quite smartly caught uh the the themes that sort of the UN audience wanted to hear and AUKUS was slightly forgotten in that mix now um I didn't hear what what Chomsky had to um to say to you and uh he's uh you know he's got a long track record of um not entirely pro-american foreign policy statements but uh you know obviously what he touched on is something that uh does continue to shadow us at the UN which is what is the future of UN-Chinese relations going to mean for a multilateral organization um such as this one and uh on that I would say that since since the start of the year despite differences over Ethiopia, despite differences over Myanmar, the Chinese have done everything they can to avoid unnecessary clashes with the US. I think there's been a degree of hedging by the Chinese because they have wanted to keep open the possibility of cooperation at the UN and I think overall probably Chinese-US relations at the UN have been better than Chinese-US relations in the wider world um you know the the million dollar question looking into the future of the UN is will the two powers continue to manage their relations at roughly this level of um amity uh because if they don't um then I think you're going to see a deepening crisis a multilateral cooperation um and that won't just be in the Security Council it will be much more generally I mean you've seen in the last couple of weeks people in the US demanding that the managing director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva should should stand down because she allegedly uh sort of fixed the IMF necessarily some World Bank data to favor the Chinese. I mean that sort of Chinese-US um competition which we saw in pretty brutal terms in the Trump era could do a lot to derail multilateral cooperation and so you know looking well beyond Ireland's time in the Security Council looking five years ten years ahead um you know this this is the sort of the biggest question that we face can can Beijing and Washington continue to live together in New York. We could look uh thank you very much for for all of your insights this evening it's been it's been fascinating hour listening to you we're just really very clocked and we wrap up there I think everybody's tuning in and hopefully everybody like listens back to the discussion and watches us we'll push it out on our social media channels and I think they'll enormously benefit from your insights you're right at the heart of the action there and some of the insights you're able to share with us on a whole range of issues we touch on everything and I'm really delighted to welcome you and look forward to doing so again at some point in the future maybe even we get you over to Dublin when it's safe to do so and we're back to some sort of level of normality but Richard thank you very much for joining us and we really appreciate it thank you very much indeed have a have a great evening